Profiling and polarization in the Arizona immigration and Manhattan mosque controversies

Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesPedestrians stand outside of the proposed site for the Cordoba Initiative Mosque and Cultural Center which would be blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan.

By Reginald T. Jackson

More than a decade ago, New Jersey found itself in a major struggle over racial profiling by the State Police. Minority motorists were unfairly and illegally stopped, searched, arrested and sometimes injured because of the color of their skin.

The primary cause of racial profiling on New Jersey’s roads was the fear that minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics, were criminals transporting drugs and guns on the state’s highways and roads. To its credit, the state, albeit reluctantly, admitted and then addressed the evil of racial profiling through diligent monitoring and other corrective measures.

Today, the United States finds itself not only engaged in, but in many instances, embracing and encouraging racial profiling. To what should be our collective shame, some in this nation want to make racial profiling legal. Arizona has passed an immigration law that promotes racial profiling. If it survives court challenges, the law will encourage law enforcement, bounty hunters and others to stop Hispanics and force them to prove they are American citizens.

In New York, meanwhile, there is furor over a proposed mosque being built in Lower Manhattan near Ground Zero. Muslims own the property and have a constitutional right to build the mosque, but many oppose the plan and claim it is “unwise” and “insensitive” to families of 9/11 victims, heroes and Ground Zero itself.

The controversy has become a national political issue. President Obama, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others who acknowledge the right of Muslims to build the mosque have been criticized as coddling terrorists and not caring about America and the victims of the Sept. 11 tragedy.

We are promoting and encouraging racial profiling today because of fear. We are polarizing and dividing our nation as a result. We are unfairly and with great harm alienating Hispanics and Muslims, stigmatizing them as criminals and terrorists. And we are doing so while many in the country remain silent on the issue.

The overwhelming majority of Hispanics and Muslims, like the overwhelming majority of whites, African-Americans, Asians and others who compose the American mosaic, love the United States and are law-abiding citizens.

There are others besides Hispanics who are illegal aliens in this country, and others besides Muslims who are domestic terrorists. Through racial profiling it is we, not terrorists, who are weakening and tearing our country apart.

Our enemies’ greatest weapons are not bombs and explosives; their best weapon is fear, and we are allowing our fear to do their work for them.

Rather than being afraid, we need to develop bipartisan national immigration legislation and make our antiterrorism agencies more effective so we not only detect and halt foreign terrorists, but domestic terrorism as well. Tragically, our greatest terrorism threat today is our partisan “gotcha” politics, which puts party above nation and undermines our national security.
The Rev. Reginald T. Jackson is pastor of St. Matthew AME Church in Orange and executive director of the Black Ministers Council-NJ.